Shall I Merge That Data? Assessing Consistency of Traffic Data Collected from Multiple Sources

The design and development of intelligent transport systems rely heavily on the availability of data, which allows for a more comprehensive understanding of current traffic conditions and their likely evolution. While merging all data sources together might be tempting, ensuring the consistency of data collected from different sources is crucial. Noise or large discrepancies can jeopardise the usefulness of merging data and hinder the potential benefits. This paper investigates the integration of data from different sources by analysing the consistency of data from two sensor sets deployed in a region of Manchester, United Kingdom. To perform this analysis, we identified suitable road segments for consideration and leveraged extended Kalman filters. Further, we exploit the opportunity to assess the sensitivity of the sensors to potentially critical circumstances.